🎶 Turn out the lights, the Twitter’s over! 🎶

* TWITTER'S CURRENT MANAGEMENT PLANNED TO PARE CO'S PAYROLL BY ABOUT $800 MILLION BY THE END OF NEXT YEAR- WAPO@Reuters $TWTR

— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla) October 20, 2022

SCOOP: Elon Musk told investors he planned to cut 75% of Twitter’s workforce, gutting to a skeleton staff of 2,000. Also, Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman passed on the Twitter deal. Via me @faizsays @GerritD @jeremybmerrill https://t.co/epoiv3pArV

— Elizabeth Dwoskin (@lizzadwoskin) October 20, 2022

you float this when you want people to quit in droves instead of having to pay severancehttps://t.co/ovUiY8eMok

— rat king (@MikeIsaac) October 20, 2022

Musk is only buying it to cut his losses, by which I mean what he’s paying lawyers for being stupid in the first place. (If he goes to court, he pays A LOT for the trial, and then pays Twitter to complete the deal he tried to walk away from). If Thiel and Hoffman didn’t want a piece of this action, Musk is even more likely to finance it by burdening Twitter with the debt. He still loses money, but he was gonna do that anyway (why he tried to walk in the first place). Now he’s gonna burn it to the ground just to prove he’s smart. 

Or something.

Truth is he’s no better at business than Trump. He can’t fund Starlink forever (he acted like he could); his toy rocket ships keep exploding rather than launching; and apparently he’s bored with the Boring Company or moving to Mars. The Tesla truck appeared in two iterations but never made it to production; the self-driving Tesla is never going to arrive; and his robot is still a person in a costume.

I wonder if anyone is going to dress as one for Hallowe’en?

Musk is much better at hyping himself than Trump ever was. Except that skill doesn’t really run a business, either.

Let me underline my point:

Not long after the FBI executed its Aug. 8 search, Trumpworld let the media know that fundraising was booming. But a new campaign finance report from Trump reveals that was just half the story—the good half. https://t.co/8ftucYOYxr

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) October 20, 2022

In fact, the spending was so steep that it ate up around 90 percent of what he raised. So while the committee took in an impressive $24 million, it spent about $22 million to get there. https://t.co/8ftucYOYxr

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) October 20, 2022

It turns out, the sources had kept mum about how much it was costing Trump to reach and convert those donors. https://t.co/8ftucYOYxr

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) October 20, 2022

I’m honestly not sure Musk would do any better. Except Musk is rich enough to fund a political campaign; and Trump…isn’t.